Chapter 24: Robb Starkton Raises the Northern Banners

The raven arrived on a Tuesday, which Robb Starkton would remember afterwards not because Tuesday was significant but because he had been in the middle of reviewing the estate's autumn grain accounts when Vayon's replacement — a young man named Farrow who had not yet learned to school his expression — came through the study door with his face arranged in the particular configuration of a person delivering news that cannot be improved by the manner of its delivery.

Robb set down the accounts.

He had known, in the way that one knows a thing before one knows it, for something like a fortnight. Ravens arrived and departed with more than usual frequency. His mother's letters from King's Landing-upon-Thames had become shorter — not curt, never curt, Lady Catelyn Starkton was constitutionally incapable of curtness — but more precise, stripped of the domestic particulars she usually furnished with the reliability of a woman who understood that home required describing to those temporarily removed from it. The particulars had gone. What remained was information, delivered with a care that had the quality of a woman measuring every word against the question of what its recipient could be expected to bear.